A Kingdom's Ruin - Chapter 6

I did not care.

I had no particular attachment to living, and from a certain day onward, I believed completely in fate.

I had no intention of cultivating virtue, nor any wish to defy heaven and change my destiny. Whether I was named the ruin of a kingdom or condemned to die young made no difference.

If fate said this was what I was, then this was what I would be.

If I had been born evil, I would destroy it all.

Yuwen Che knew nothing of what awaited him.

He had been told that his mother was a criminal slave who died giving birth. Alone all those years, he wanted nothing more than a mother. So although he knew I was no good, he still came wagging his tail.

His bright, beautiful eyes were always full of smiles. He tried with all his might to amuse me.

At first I was bored enough to play along with our little performance of a loving mother and devoted son. I made a show of fussing over him, bestowed the gold and jewels that were cluttering my palace, defended him when others bullied him, and killed the servants who had once looked down on him.

One of them was tortured into a limbless human stump before his eyes. Yuwen Che trembled as he clung to my sleeve.

I found his fear amusing, so I had every servant who had mistreated him executed.

“If you’re unhappy,” I told him, “make sure someone else suffers more. Then no one will laugh at you.”

And so he became utterly alone.

The other princes his age had grown up cherished. Even those without mothers had maternal clans to shelter them, people to ask whether they were warm in winter and dress them in fashionable silks in summer.

They liked to feel superior to Yuwen Che. They mocked him as a motherless child, unloved and unprotected, a stray dog surviving in a palace that devoured men whole.

After I appeared, however, no child in the inner palace was more lavishly “loved.” He lived more nobly than the crown prince.

The others tormented him for it. No matter how vicious their tricks, he guarded anything I had made for him with his life. Then he came back pretending nothing had happened and told me what a wonderful day he had enjoyed.

I took him fishing, taught him pitch-pot, climbed rooftops with him to watch the full moon. I gave him the finest cloth, found him the finest teachers, and placed in his hands everything others could only dream of.

He was happy every day.

Naturally, that made him a target.

When the mood struck me, I spoke deliberately of his dead mother.

“You’ve never seen her. Don’t you miss her? Aren’t you curious what she looked like?”

“I don’t know. I… this son never met her.”

Speaking of a dead mother to a lonely child was like carving flesh from bone. I showed no restraint.

“When you see other mothers and sons together, don’t you envy them? Don’t you resent it? Why, among so many children, were you the one who lost his mother?”

“You are my mother.” He grew anxious, terrified I might misunderstand. “I will not be deceived by idle words. I will treat you well. I will become someone you can rely on.”

I studied him. “It isn’t the same. It will never be the same, Che’er. I’m only four years older than you. How could I have protected you as a child? If your mother were alive, you would never need to please me so carefully.”

“I… I wasn’t…”

I rose, seized his arm, and led him to the dungeon beneath Kunning Palace.

A battered woman was chained inside.

“Do you know her?” I asked.

He stared for a moment. “Nanny Xu. She was my wet nurse… my moth—her personal maid.”

I drew a vial from my sleeve. “Truth Water from the Western Regions. Anyone who drinks it can speak only truth. Don’t you want to know how your birth mother died?”

Yuwen Che hesitated, then approached.

“How did my mother die?”

“His… His Majesty. His Majesty ordered her killed as soon as the princess gave birth. I strangled her unconscious with a silk ribbon, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He had her flayed…”

Yuwen Che looked lost. “My mother… was a princess? But the princess’s child died with her in the womb.”

“Your mother, Yun Ruo, was the only daughter of the Great Zhou emperor and empress—the most honored princess of the former dynasty.”

Smiling, I took his trembling hand and felt the cold I had hoped to find.

“Oh dear. What a palace secret we’ve stumbled upon.”

Four years. Exactly four.

His thirteenth year was as wretched as mine had been.

Guiding his hands, I wound silk around the woman’s neck and whispered into his ear, “One little pull, and you can avenge your mother’s murder.”

She was the first person he killed.